Reimagining the Home Chef ordering experience with a more transparent order summary.

Project Background

Project Background

In the earlier years of the company, Home Chef’s orders were typically 3 meal kits at a time, and the digital experience reflected that. The menu page featured a “Your Picks” section at the top of suggested meals (usually 3) and meal cards that filled the space perfectly to fit that order. The menu also used to feature fewer meals each week, but now a typical weekly menu has over 50 items to choose from. With all of these updates to the menu’s item availability, it was time for the company to give customers a new ordering experience that would allow them to do things like better compare their order to the rest of the menu, encourage them to order more than 3 items at a time, and give them a clear confirmation that their order was placed.

Creating a new workflow

One of the first things we had to do for this project was evaluate how customers were ordering their meals with the current ordering structure and find ways to make improvements to that experience.

To get a better understanding of the ordering flow, we conducted user research with long-time customers. Through this research, we learned that customers were frequently reviewing their selections, scrolling through the menu to find new meals, saving their changes, and going through that same flow again until they eventually moved on to their next order or left the site. From this, we learned a number of things, including:

  • Customers like to review their selections multiple times as they edit

  • There is no sort of order confirmation once a customer has finished making their edits

  • Customers were doing a lot of scrolling while editing

These insights led us to draft an ideal updated flow. The update allowed customers to see their live changes in the order summary while editing, plus gave them a more concrete confirmation once they completed making any changes to their order.

Launching the redesign

Once we nailed down the right flow and cleaned up the user interface to get to a place that worked well for our customers, we launched the new experience to our customers. And because this new way of ordering was such a big shift from what our customers were used to, we made sure to launch some educational onboarding modals for customers during their first run with this updated ordering flow to make sure that they knew what to do.